Ocean acoustic tomography from different receiver geometries using the adjoint method

In this paper, an ocean acoustic tomography inversion using the adjoint method in a shallow water environment is presented. The propagation model used is an implicit Crank-Nicolson finite difference parabolic equation solver with a non-local boundary condition. Unlike previous matched-field processing works using the complex pressure fields as the observations, here, the observed signals are the transmission losses. Based on the code tests of the tangent linear model, the adjoint model, and the gradient, the optimization problem is solved by a gradient-based minimization algorithm. The inversions are performed in numerical simulations for two geometries: one in which hydrophones are sparsely distributed in the horizontal direction, and another in which the hydrophones are distributed vertically. The spacing in both cases is well beyond the half-wavelength threshold at which beamforming could be used. To deal with the ill-posedness of the inverse problem, a linear differential regularization operator of the sound-speed profile is used to smooth the inversion results. The L-curve criterion is adopted to select the regularization parameter, and the optimal value can be easily determined at the elbow of the logarithms of the residual norm of the measured-predicted fields and the norm of the penalty function.